Should West Virginians skip an electric car?

Now that you know where your state stands in terms of how its electricity is produced thanks to our two-part series on the Best and Worst U.S. States to plug in a plug-in, what do you do if you don’t live in one of the best states to plug in an electric car (yes, those of you in the American Northwest are sitting pretty on this issue!)? For example, maybe you live in a Dirty Coal dominated state like West Virginia, Wyoming or Kentucky and want to buy a plug-in.

We won’t stop you – and we won’t lambaste you either. But we hope you’ll strongly consider doing what you can to help grow renewable energy forms in your state, either by defying the economic and political odds in the Big Coal states and investing in home solar and/or home wind, and/or by actively lobbying your local and state politicians to increase the percentage of electricity in your bottom-tier state that is generated by renewable energy forms.

EV advocates like to point out that multiple studies have repeatedly showed that plugging tens of millions of electric cars into America’s electric grid won’t require the building of new coal power plants – if those electric cars are plugged in at night, when coal plants have plenty of extra capacity.

However, that doesn’t mean that:

We shouldn’t work to reduce the number of coal plants in the U.S and that we should do so by increasing the percentage of electricity in our grid – and in our plug-in’s batteries – that’s produced by renewable forms like solar, wind and geothermal.

Also, simply because multiple studies seem to show that more EVs doesn’t need to increase the number of coal smokestacks in the U.S. doesn’t mean that this won’t occur.

It seems to us that it’s incumbent upon the EV advocates making the claims that EV growth won’t also grow coal smokestacks in the U.S. to do everything they can to ensure that, in the long run, these claims – which, by the way, we at SolarChargedDriving.Com have every reason to believe are true – do in fact bear out.

The oil industry has certainly leveraged “growth” effectively to argue for more oil production, and ultimately consumption – as evidence, for example, by President Obama’s ill-timed decision to open large areas of America’s coastline to offshore drilling.

Will coal industry use EVs as excuse to grow?It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the coal industry will use the same tactics as the oil industry if plug-ins grow in the U.S. perhaps into the tens of millions in the next decade or so, meaning it will point to increasing numbers of EVs as a justification to grow coal.

It seems to us that it’s incumbent upon the EV advocates making the claims that EV growth won’t also grow coal smokestacks in the U.S. to do everything they can to ensure that, in the long run, these claims – which, by the way, we at SolarChargedDriving.Com have every reason to believe are true – do in fact bear out.

To us, that translates into plug-in owners plugging directly into residential renewable energy whenever, and wherever they can – even if this means buying renewable energy credits from your utility when you can’t put solar on your home or wind in your backyard. It means driving, and living, efficiently, and, ideally, driving only as much as one needs to, and, finally, driving less. And it means actively lobbying for renewable energy in your backyard, in your state, in the U.S., and around the world.

One of the greatest things about electric cars is that they can be powered by clean, renewable forms of energy. But just because they can be powered this way, doesn’t mean that they will be. The “will be” will only happen if we – plug-in drivers of the U.S. and the world – make it happen.

So, please, do your part and help us make a renewable energy powered electric grid happen for all of us!

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About The Author

Christof Demont-Heinrich is founder, creator and editor of SolarChargedDriving.Com, which he launched in September 2009. A journalism professor at the University of Denver (DU), Demont-Heinrich is a lifelong environmentalist who loves to bird, hike, camp, and bike. As passionate as he is about the environment -- and about promoting the synergy between solar power and electric cars, he is equally passionate about writing.